The Rocks Cry Out

About the Book

This collection of 55 finely-crafted short stories and a short novel reveal the mystique of inexplicable happenings, the human passions of revenge, ambition, the humanity of blood-ties and alienation by greed, circumstance and choice. They are stories of action, of loss and triumph of the human spirit and love of life, strikingly contrary to the culture of death of the modern American New Age sophisticate. There is humor in naivete, angst in the scorn of power, mystery in inexplicable happenings in real life. There emerges, also, that folly of risk, that loneliness of celebration alone by the aged, that pandering to power by the cunning and a love-promise broken only by death. What things appear to be in this life are not what, in reality they are beneath the surface. Nor what they might have been with a little luck. To say more is to give away the mystery of narration, ancient pasttime for mankind the world over.

About the Author

Miller considers himself to be a "Western writer" - for whatever that may mean definitively - yet believes himself to be far from parochial in his perceptions of human nature. He has enjoyed the out-of-doors most of his life, numerous trail hikes in for or flive national forests, a 160-mile boat ride down the Colorado River, when younger an avid off-trail backpacker, often daring danger by solo hikes in order to sense the silence and voices of the wildeness. He still skis cross-country. The lore of the early West is a favorite exploration of his. In quite a few of his short stories he has tried to listen to the voices, the idiom of an earlier America. Just as a musician does not learn music but is shaped by the discipline of training, Miller enrolled in the Stanford Creative Writing Center after WW II (of which he is a veteran.) He is a native of California and a "product", if that's the right word, of a public school system that seemed in some ways to be smarter in its subject matter than it is nowadays. One's feelings about history or political science were of less importance than the truths of its substance. Square dancing, backpacking and photography are his hobbies, a few attempts at acting thrown into the mix.